In the past decade or so, many of the social sciences have noted a move away from this mode of existence toward entanglement, in which, now to quote
Mol (2002
, 54) correctly, “to be is to be related.” You think there is such a thing as a gene that we can isolate? Well, think again. A gene is a relationship, and that relationship is political. You think genes determine beingness? Well, think again. Epigenetics demonstrates that gene expression is enacted through the environment of the organism. You think a fact, a number, or a piece of evidence can stand alone, can be a thing in itself? Well, think again. All of the entities that looked bounded through those misguided modernist lenses are embedded in a myriad of relations and, in fact, do not exist without them. This must be the way to live in mutuality with each other on and with this planet: tracing out and acknowledging the messy and entangled relations that produce existence. But the fact that certain groups of people are and have always been entangled in shit makes me wonder about entanglement. What does an entangled prescription for being in the world do for or with those who have always had to stay with the trouble?

In my effort here to examine what-gets-inside in Colonia Periférico, and to reflect critically on entanglement, I am indebted to scholars who think about the starkly differential distribution of entanglement in terms of porosity across distinct lifeworlds. In investigating what
Vanessa Agard-Jones (2016)
calls the “chemical kinships” produced on the pesticide-saturated island of Martinique, she describes how some bodies are disproportionately porous, prompting us to think more about the nonlinear effects of toxic chemicals on the poor and the colonized. With a similar focus on the chemical traces of the Atlantic slave trade,
Tiffany Lethabo King (2016
, 1035–36) writes of eighteenth-century indigo plantations in the American South, where the site of indigo processing was a “rank and putrid smelling zone infested with flies. It was a place on the plantation where it was hard to breathe and a zone many avoided,” which meant that “the enslaved toiling there were not always within the master’s immediate field of vision.” While the chemicals that seeped into the pores of the enslaved contributed to their early deaths (death came five to seven years after starting to work the indigo [
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, 1037) argues that this toxicity provided “new geographies of Black freedom.” Putrid toxicity disrupted the master’s gaze.

Agard-Jones and King are grappling with the legacy of capitalist expansion, which valorized those who experienced the self as stable, free, sovereign individuals separate from nature who could control or manage what-gets-inside. Their analysis deepens my concern that entanglement constitutes an extremely imperfect means for understanding unequal lifeworlds. My intention, then, is not to discard entanglement altogether, but to point to how those living in the shit (who, in fact, don’t need anthropologists, STS scholars, or even Marx to explain how objects are made of relations) often seek boundaries between objects, as well as the stability that boundaried objects have to offer. In other words, entanglement is not always welcome, even in highly relational worlds. It depends on the how and the what and the when.